A Study on the Selection Pattern of Players in any Team Sport

Abstract

In this paper, we study the pattern of inclusion and exclusion of players from a team in any team sport. Usually these inclusions and exclusions are related to the player’s performance in the matches previously played. Also the inclusion and exclusion at any particular cycle depends on the player’s history as observed through the number of times he has been included or excluded previously. The focus of this paper is to study this pattern for cricketers who have represented their respective countries in One Day Internationals (ODIs). As observed in the study, there is a distinct difference in the inclusion and exclusion patterns of bowlers and batsmen, and hence the two groups have been studied separately. Respective survival functions over the cycles of inclusion and exclusion have been constructed for both groups. These reveal several interesting features regarding the chances of an ODI cricketer being retained or dropped from the team.